Kept by Shawntelle Madison Page A

Warcraft, but he wasn’t playing as just any old regular WoW character. He was playing as an elf—a well-endowed blood elf death knight who could also have been a real dark elf hooker snagging a john on a corner. Why he preferred to play as a woman wasn’t any of my business, I figured.
    “Old Leslie told me to bring these people to come see you, Roscoe,” Jack said.
    Roscoe flipped off his headset, giving us at least a part of his attention, though his right hand still flew across the keyboard, as if he planned to continue to fight orcs while he spoke to us. “What do you want?”
    His black-eyed gaze swept from Alex to Thorn, and then finally his eyes rested on me—on my boobs anyway. His grin wasn’t attractive. Not with those oversized chompers. “Perhaps I need to make an addition to my stable.”
    Most werewolf men who approached me didn’t say such things. When I walked around town, strangers would leer at me in my pencil skirt, but once they actually met me, my behavior told another tale—I wasn’t like all the other werewolf girls.
    “What kind of place is this?” I asked Thorn.
    “One that your father hadn’t meant for you to ever see,” he murmured. He kept his face forward, his eyes focused on the guards.
    Even though Thorn wasn’t as large as them, the guards assessed him with wary, alert eyes.
    “We’re here on business,” Thorn said.
    “You men don’t look like the type who usually come looking for people like me.” He switched his gaze to Alex. “You’re rather scrawny.”
    Looking at the guards standing around us, I had to concede that he had a point. Alex matched my height of five foot seven. He had a muscular build and all, but he took after my mom, and she definitely didn’t have my father’s girth.
    Roscoe’s gaze went to Thorn, and I wondered what the older man thought of him. But instead of lingering on Thorn, he assessed me. “I have plenty of men—but I could always use a pretty girl.”
    “No, thanks,” I whispered. “You don’t want me in stock at your little store. I have cooties.”
    At the same time, Thorn said, “She’s with me.”
    Roscoe laughed. “Interesting. So, what does an alpha want in a place like this? No need to deny it. You practically have most of my men hungry to fight you.”
    Three of the guards faced Thorn head-on, but no one else looked directly at him. They didn’t need eyes to see his stance. The way he filled space with his powerful presence.
    “What is it? You lose a few thousand at the tables?” Roscoe’s bushy eyebrows danced. “You need to buy back the farm you came from?”
    “Not exactly. I’m actually here looking for someone.” Thorn motioned for Alex to speak.
    Alex seemed hesitant but stepped forward. “We’relooking for Fyodor Stravinsky. He had business here recently.”
    Roscoe made a sarcastic snort. Then he rolled his tongue over his teeth. “What do you care for that ublyudok ?”
    I tried to take a step forward, but Thorn grabbed me. How dare Roscoe call my father a bastard? I tensed as the urge to attack him strengthened. Thorn’s hand on my hip tightened painfully.
    Alex was far less reserved. In Russian, he spat back, “Watch your words if you value your tongue. Are you the man who owns his debt?”
    “What if I am? Take your piss-poor honor back home, pup.” He sneered, revealing a single canine. In English, Roscoe said, “Grown men take care of their own moon debts.”
    “I want to see my father,” I said.
    Roscoe leaned forward, abandoning his computer game. “Do you know what it means to fulfill a moon debt, devushka ?”
    “I have an idea.” I also knew what a blood debt was, having recently had one on my own head for the death of another, but that had nothing to do with the problem at hand.
    Thorn moved in front of me, but he couldn’t prevent Roscoe’s gaze from boring into me.
    “A long time ago, when the Code was first being forged, men always paid their debts one week after the full